Phil Rosenthal

He started out in the 1970s as a mandolin player and singer in New England bands. On Apple Country Bluegrass (Orchard, 1974) he plays mandolin and sings lead, tenor and baritone with Apple Country. Old Dog, his next band, was a quartet with Beth Sommers Rosenthal on bass and the brothers Barry and Bruce Stockwell on guitar and banjo, and in 1978 it recorded Mike Auldridge & ‘Old Dog’ for Flying Fish, with Auldridge on Dobro and pedal steel. Four of its thirteen tracks were Rosenthal’s songs, among them “Hot Stuff” and “Wild Kentucky Roan.” That year Flying Fish also issued his own album, Indian Summer, with the same players plus Warren Blair on fiddle and Auldridge as a guest. Rosenthal played mandolin, lead guitar and rhythm guitar on it and wrote eleven of the twelve songs.

“Muddy Water” had already traveled well beyond Connecticut. By 1977 the Seldom Scene had put it on two albums, first in July 1973 for Act III, with Starling singing lead. Bill and James Monroe cut it as “Muddy Waters” at Bradley’s Barn in Mount Juliet, Tennessee, on 30 January 1978 for their MCA album Together Again, and Johnny Cash included it on Silver (Columbia, 1979). The Osborne Brothers and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds also recorded it.

In 1977 Starling left the Seldom Scene to give more time to his medical career, and Rosenthal took his place on guitar and lead vocals, alongside John Duffey on mandolin, Mike Auldridge on Dobro, Ben Eldridge on banjo and Tom Gray on bass. He and Starling shared the lead singing on Baptizing (Rebel, 1978), and the band then moved to Sugar Hill for Act Four (1979), After Midnight (1981), At the Scene (1983) and Blue Ridge (1985), the last made with the singer Jonathan Edwards. His baritone lead set off Duffey’s high tenor, and he typically wrote two or three songs per album and added guitar solos to the band’s sound. With the Scene he toured the United States, Europe and Japan and played the Grand Ole Opry and the White House.

The band’s members also backed his second solo album, A Matter of Time (Sierra, 1983). It was recorded in 1981 at Bias Recording in Springfield, Virginia, with Duffey, Auldridge, Eldridge and Gray on several tracks and Byron Berline on fiddle and Jerry Douglas on Dobro on others, and Rosenthal wrote every song, one of them with Beth Sommers Rosenthal. Sierra and Hollywood Records reissued it on CD in 1996.

Rosenthal left the Seldom Scene in 1986, at the same time as Gray; Lou Reid and T. Michael Coleman took their places. He returned for the band’s 20th-anniversary concert on 29 November 1991, playing guitar and singing with Duffey, Auldridge, Eldridge and Gray on seven songs of the live set Scene 20 (Sugar Hill, 1992).

He left the band to run American Melody, the company he and Beth Sommers had founded in Guilford to record bluegrass and folk music for children and families. Its first release, Turkey in the Straw: Bluegrass Songs for Children (1985), has him playing banjo, mandolin, guitar and bass. It was followed by The Paw Paw Patch (1987), Comin’ Round the Mountain (1994), Animal Songs (1997), This Land Is Your Land (1999) and A Treasury of Bluegrass and Country Songs (2009), and Rounder gathered his children’s recordings as Folksongs and Bluegrass for Children: A Phil Rosenthal Collection (2000). The label’s records won awards from the Parents’ Choice Foundation and the American Library Association, and Rosenthal also produced albums for other artists there. In 1994 he was named Connecticut State Troubadour. He performs with the Sommers Rosenthal Family, with Beth Sommers and their children, the singer and songwriter Naomi Sommers and the trumpeter Daniel Rosenthal, and the group released Down the Road on American Melody in 2016.